Katharine M. RoGers
C
at
A
nimal
Series editor: Jonathan Burt
Already published Crow Boria Sax Ant Charlotte Sleigh Tortoise Peter Young Cockroach Marion Copeland Dog Susan McHugh Oyster Rebecca Stott Bear Robert E. Bieder Rat Jonathan Burt Snake Drake Stutesman Parrot Paul Carter Bee Claire Preston Tiger Susie Green Whale Joe Roman Falcon Helen Macdonald Peacock Christine E. Jackson Fly Steven Connor Fox Martin Wallen Salmon Peter Coates Forthcoming . . . Hare Simon Carnell Moose Kevin Jackson Crocodile Richard Freeman Spider
Katja and Sergiusz Michalski
Duck Victoria de Rijke Wolf Garry Marvin Elephant Daniel Wylie Pigeon Barbara Allen Horse Elaine Walker Penguin Stephen Martin Rhinoceros Kelly Enright
Cat
Katharine M. Rogers
Published by
r e a k t i o n b o o k s lt d
33Great Sutton Street London ec1v 0dx, uk www.reaktionbooks.co.uk
First published 2006
Copyright © Katharine M. Rogers 2006 All rights reserved
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publishers.
Printed and bound in Singapore by CS Graphics British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Rogers, Katharine M.
Cat. - (Animal)
1. Cats 2. Human-animal relationships I. Title
636.8
isbn-13: 978 1 86189 292 8 isbn-10: 1 86189 292 6
Contents
1
Wildcat to Domestic Mousecatcher 7
2
The Magic of Cats, Evil and Good 49
3
Cherished Inmates of Home and Salon 80
4
Cats and Women 114
5
Cats Appreciated as Individuals 142
6
The Fascination of Paradox 161
Timeline 180
References 182
Bibliography 192
Associations and Websites 194
Acknowledgements 197
Photo Acknowledgements 198
Index 200
When humans first evolved, they found themselves sharing their world with other animals that engaged their attention as threats, as rivals and as food. But along with these practical concerns, they were impressed by the superior strength, speed, sensory acuteness, and precise coordination they saw in so many of the animals. When humans began to express themselves artistically, in the late Paleolithic era, they drew hunts of large animals on the walls of caves. Animals fascinate us because we recognize in them consciousness, sensations, drives, and emotions like our own – yet at the same time they remain sufficiently alien that we can never hope to fully understand and communicate with them. The relationship became closer when people began to domesticate animals, starting with the dog about 14,000 years ago. They came to know these animals in a more personal way and developed deep affection for some of them, although the systematic use of creatures under their control could lead to ruthless exploitation. No matter how fond people may be of particular animals, they tend to take for granted a right to treat them as they like and use them as is convenient.
It was natural for people living in close contact with animals to look at them in human terms; comparisons usually worked to the animal’s disadvantage, since it was humans who made them. People projected onto other animals the physical appetites
1
Wildcat to Domestic
Mousecatcher
that they did not want to recognize in themselves – dogs are dirty, pigs are greedy, goats are lustful. They branded donkeys as stubborn and stupid because the animals did not always comply with their masters’ unceasing demands. Even though they loved dogs more than any other animal companions, they tended to see them as inferior and appropriately less privileged versions of humans – think of the common epithets ‘dog’, ‘cur’ and ‘bitch’ and expressions like ‘in the doghouse’ and ‘not fit for a dog’.
Cats, the last of the familiar domestic animals to be domes-ticated, have fared better than most. They have not been exploited, for people kept them to do work – catching rodent pests – that they spontaneously enjoy doing. Although they have been made emblems of sexuality, the sexuality they repre-sent is often attractive. Their self-contained aloofness saves them from being patronized as dogs are. The same aloofness led people to credit them with uncanny abilities, which ensured them a certain respect.
On the other hand, it could lay them open to superstitious persecution: cats were commonly suspected of complicity with the devil in medieval and early modern times. Often, however, this suspicion was less the result of ideological belief than a pre-text for tormenting them. Cats were readily available and esteemed of negligible value, for they did not win affection by fidelity like dogs or make substantial contributions to human welfare such as the meat of pigs and the labour of oxen. Therefore they were handy objects for organized cruelty or casual sadism. At annual ceremonies in many places, cats were burned alive to expel evil from the community. Idle soldiers in Kilkenny would amuse themselves by tying two cats together by the tail, hanging them upside down, and watching them claw each other frantically to get free; these were the originals of the
9 Ink sketches of cats in motion or at rest by Leonardo da Vinci, c. 1510s.
cats of Kilkenny in the traditional rhyme, which describes their mutual destruction as amusing. In the 1730s, a group of appren-tice printers in Paris used cats as surrogates for social superiors that they dared not attack directly. At this time cats were chang-ing in status from utilitarian domestic assistants to pets, and it seemed to the apprentices that their employers treated their pet cats better than their employees. The apprentices expressed their resentment by formally trying and hanging the neigh-bourhood cats, starting with their mistress’s cherished pet.1
Such callousness seems hard to believe in these times, when cats have come to be widely accepted as pets and valued as attractive and agreeable friends. But it is only during the last three centuries that cats have joined dogs as companion ani-mals and members of the family. Nowadays, any references to cats’ supposed uncanny powers or connection with witches are playful and affectionate. Their refusal to defer to humans like other domestic animals, which seemed wickedly insubordinate in earlier centuries, is now taken as evidence of self-respecting independence.
The paleontogical history of the cat can be traced back to the great diversification of mammals in the Paleocene epoch, at the beginning of the Cenozoic era, over 60 million years ago. The first members of its order, Carnivora, were miacids, tree-dwelling creatures that looked like pine martens and were about 20 cm (8 in) long. They did have the carnassial teeth that distinguish the Carnivora, a pair of sharpened cheek teeth that are aligned so as to work like shears in slicing meat off bone; but they had a full complement of other teeth as well and probably ate a mixed diet. For 25 million years, the dominant mam-malian flesh-eaters were not Carnivora but creodonts, who also have carnassial teeth, but less efficient ones. They died out,
per-haps because the miacids were better able to adapt to changing conditions.
True cats evolved from the miacid lineage about 30 million years ago; the earliest one is Proailurus, which weighed about 9 kg (20 lb) and resembled the modern fossa of Madagascar – a lithe animal of the civet family that hunts by leaping from branch to branch in the trees. Proailurus had more teeth than a modern cat and a less convoluted brain; the modern feline brain has gained mainly in the areas controlling hearing, eye-sight, and limb coordination. Its descendant, Pseudaeluris, which evolved 20 million years ago, had teeth close to those of a modern cat but had a longer back, like a civet. It also spent more of its time in the trees than do modern cats, which have adapted to running on the ground. Two lines descended from
Pseudaeluris, the Felinae, ancestors of all the modern cat species,
and the sabre-toothed cats; and by the Pleistocene epoch (500,000 years ago), species from both groups were roaming all over Eurasia, Africa, and North America.
The sabre-tooths, the first successful large Felidae, dominat-ed the scene through the Miocene epoch and became extinct in the Holocene, about 10,000 years ago, perhaps because their prey died out. Heavily muscled, short-legged animals who prob-ably killed by plunging their enormous upper canines into their victim’s throat, they were ideally adapted to catch large, tough-skinned prey, but were no match for the newly evolved nimble herbivores; and they lost out to faster, smarter cats. Un-fortunately, we cannot trace in detail the evolution of the living species of cats, especially the small ones from whom our domes-tic cat is descended, because the fossil record is scanty. Their habitat, forests, was not favourable for preserving fossils. The feline species now extant all appeared within the past 10 million years: the lynx 3 to 4 million years ago, the puma 3 million
years ago, the leopard 2 million years ago, and the lion 700,000 years ago. The oldest remains so far discovered of the European wildcat, an early form called Felis sylvestris lunensis, date from about 2 million years ago.2
Cats are the most specialized of all the Carnivora, the only ones who exclusively eat meat: their canine and carnassial teeth are particularly well developed, and their other teeth negligible. Their flexible, muscular bodies, acute senses, lightning reflexes and highly developed teeth and claws make them the supreme stalk-and-pounce hunters. Their flexible spines enable them to twist and turn nimbly and to reach high speed by alternately flex-ing and archflex-ing their backs (though this technique uses so much energy that they lack the endurance of canids and ungulates). They have long canine teeth set in powerful jaws to pierce the neck of their prey and sharp claws to grab and position it for the killing bite, as well as to climb. The small cats, which live on small prey, kill it with a very precise bite to the neck, driving their canines in between two vertebrae so that they pierce the spinal cord and thus instantly disable it from coordinating any defence. Cats have nerve endings around their canines so they can sense where to place the teeth and jaw muscles with an exceptionally short contraction time. (Canids, in contrast, cannot place their bites so precisely; on the other hand, they can crush bones, while cats can only slice flesh.) Cats keep their claws sharp by retract-ing them when not in use; the resultant soft paws enable the animal to steal up silently on its prey, although they are not suit-ed to distance running. By contracting a muscle, cats can extend a tendon that protracts their claws and spreads their toes, turn-ing their paws into a set of grapplturn-ing hooks.
Cats are particularly adapted for prowling and hunting by night. With large eyes and flexible pupils that can dilate from small slits or dots in bright sunshine to circles that seem to fill
their eye sockets, they can see in near darkness where the light is only one-sixth as bright as humans require, without losing the capacity to protect their retinas from the full light of midday. Even when there is no light at all, they can navigate by means of hearing acute enough to detect the movements of a mouse, amplified by outer ears that rotate to pinpoint the direction of sound; a sense of smell about 30 times better than our own (though inferior to the dog’s); and outer hairs, especially whiskers, that are sensitive to the slightest pressure and in effect extend their sense of touch beyond the surface of their skin. A cat fans its whiskers forward when pouncing on prey, which helps it to judge precisely where to deliver the killing bite.3
These accom-plished feline hunters soon spread over every continent except Australia and Antarctica and adapted to every habitat from mountain heights to desert, from forest to marsh to savanna.
The Felidae, from tigers to domestic cats, are remarkably sim-ilar in anatomy and habits. All are beautiful, graceful and
per-Felis sylvestris libyca, the African
wild cat, ancestor of the modern domestic pet.
fectly coordinated; all are skilled and avid hunters; all are at home in the dark and most of them, including all the small cats, are soli-tary. They have always fascinated humans. The lion is the undis-puted King of Beasts in western culture, held up as a model of grandeur and magnanimity; the tiger has been similarly admired in the Far East and the jaguar in Central and South America. Warriors in the ancient Germanic tribes, unacquainted with big cats, made the European wildcat an emblem of courage.
The wildcat, Felis sylvestris, is widely dispersed over Eurasia and Africa. Generally speaking, it is ferocious and untamable. However, the North African variety, Felis sylvestris libyca, is unusu-ally gentle and friendly. Before 2000 bc (when its name, miw or
mii, is first recorded), it was moving into ancient Egyptian
vil-lages to hunt the rats and mice that infested the grain supplies. The Egyptians were fond of animals and soon made a pet of it. Unlike all other domesticated animals, cats have changed little under human influence. Soon after domesticating wolves into dogs, humans modified them to serve as sight hounds, livestock guards, and so forth; but the cat was already superbly developed by nature to do its essential job: catching rodents. The modern cat is slightly smaller than its wild ancestor and has developed many variations in colour and length of coat. It breeds more rap-idly, going through two or three reproductive cycles per year instead of one. It has become moderately social, adjusting to liv-ing in a household, and in some cases even meetliv-ing regularly with neighbourhood cats on neutral territory in a sort of feline club. It retains through life juvenile characteristics that its wild ancestors outgrow: sociability, playfulness, attachment to the original nest, and an affectionate filial attitude toward larger ani-mals, notably humans. Nevertheless, it remains essentially inde-pendent and predatory. Writing in 1983, the zoologist Roger Tabor identified the cat as ‘Britain’s predominant predator’. Cats
that are not socialized to humans revert to the fierce defiance of wildcats, and feral cats, unlike feral dogs, can function success-fully without human support. They are so efficient that they threaten populations of rodents, rabbits and birds, and often out-compete other small predators like foxes and raptors.4
From about 1450 bc, the family cat regularly appears in the party scenes represented on Egyptian tomb walls, typically sit-ting under furniture, as its descendants love to do today. It is typ-ically shown under the mistress’s chair at a banquet, eagerly bit-ing into a fish or pawbit-ing at a restrainbit-ing leash to get at a bowl of food. The scribe Nebamun had himself immortalized on his tomb wall doing what he liked best – hunting in the marshes with his wife, his daughter and his cat. In this highly idealized scene, where the water is packed with fish and the sky with birds and butterflies, the cat is holding three birds that it has caught. Like many other animals in Egypt, cats were associated with a deity: Bastet, goddess of feminine allure, fertility, maternity and the home. Bastet’s attributes derive naturally from the cat’s grace and beauty, noisy sexuality, devoted motherhood and palpable enjoyment of the comforts of home. Originally a local goddess in the city of Bubastis, she rose to national prominence around 950 bc, when the founder of the 22nd Dynasty made Bubastis his cap-ital. From that time, images of Bastet, as an elegant seated cat or a cat-headed woman, are omnipresent in Egyptian art. The seated cats – alert yet serene, self-contained, with tail neatly curled around their paws – perfectly convey the natural feline poise and aloofness that could make a cat seem divine. Yet, because she was represented by a friendly household companion, Bastet had a par-ticular appeal for ordinary people. Herodotus, who toured Egypt in the fifth century bc, reported that Bastet’s temple in Bubastis was the most attractive in the whole country and her annual festi-val the most joyous and popular. In April or May, boats crammed
with men and women shouting bawdy songs and jokes would sail up the river to Bubastis, where they would celebrate with an orgy. It is important to remember, however, that Bastet was far from the most important animal deity in Egypt; it is modern ailurophiles who have made her predominant and seen cats as intrinsically more godlike than, say, bulls or jackals.
The Egyptian scribe Nebamun hunting waterfowl with his wife, his daughter and his cat, depicted in a wall painting from his tomb,
Nevertheless, it is clear that the ancient Egyptians not only domesticated cats to kill rodents and snakes, but cherished them as pets. Cats regularly share in the family pleasures, and the whole family went into mourning when their cat died. Moreover, unlike all other peoples who have kept cats, the Egyptians seem to have felt no ambivalence toward their feline pets: there is no evidence that they saw anything in them that
A mummified cat from Hellenistic Egypt.
17 Statues of Bastet,
the cat goddess, were common in Egypt from c. 950
BC, when a pharaoh made her the chief god-dess of Egypt.
was not pleasant and benign. Their fierce aspect was represent-ed by the lioness-headrepresent-ed goddess Sekhmet.
Herodotus and later Greek visitors were particularly impressed by Egyptian cats because they had never seen such animals. To those who knew only wildcats, the sight of tame ones comfortably living in the household and responding to human affection would have been wonderful indeed. Cats spread from Egypt to Greece and then throughout the Roman Empire, but they were not conspicuous in classical times. They The sun-god Ra as a cat disposing of the snake-demon Apophis in a tomb painting from 1300 bc, Deir-el-Medina. A cat herding geese in a wall painting from New Kingdom Egypt.
are only occasionally mentioned in classical works of natural history. Aristotle noted that ‘female cats are naturally lecher-ous’, since they ‘lure the males on to sexual intercourse, during which time they caterwaul’.5
This observation is accurate, since the female cat does take an aggressive role in mating – yowling to gather a group of tomcats, displaying to them, and pursuing them as long as her heat continues. It also led the way to numer-ous later attacks on female lust that turned from cats to women. Buffon’s remarkably prolonged and intense description of the female cat pursuing and forcing herself upon a reluctant male probably derived its emotional charge from apprehensions about sexually aggressive human females.
As often as not, however, classical scholars’ remarks on cats were based on nothing more than folklore or fanciful theoriz-ing. Perhaps inspired by the common identification of Bastet with Artemis and Diana, Plutarch misobserved the conspicu-ously changing pupils of cats in order to link them with the lunar cycle: cats’ pupils, he claimed, ‘grow large and round at the time of the full moon, and . . . become thin and narrow’ when it wanes. This bit of folklore was still current in 1693, when it appeared in William Salmon’s Complete English
Physician.6
There is no evidence that cats were common around the hous-es of ancient Greece or Rome. They were not even hous-established as the obvious controllers of rodent pests. Pliny the Elder names the weasel, not the cat, as the animal that strays ‘about our homes’ and chases away snakes. Both Greek ailuros and Latin felis could refer to any one of various long-tailed carnivores kept for catching mice. The specific term, catus, first appears in Palladius in ad 350, who proposed in his treatise on agriculture the novel idea that farmers might keep cats to chase moles from the vegetable garden, although he went on to say that weasels would do as well.7
Roman coin from Rhegium, showing the city founder playing with a cat.
Although cats occasionally appear on Greek vases or Roman mosaics, the first portrayals that express affection for them are touching Gallo-Roman monuments of the third and fourth cen-turies ad that show a small child clutching its beloved kitty. By the fourth century, domestic cats must have been prowling around British towns, for one left its footprints on some tiles laid out to dry beside a factory in Silchester.
Meanwhile, domestic cats were moving through Persia and India to the Far East. They were associated with evil in Zoroastrian tradition, perhaps created by the Evil Spirit and certainly treacherous, in contrast to the loyal dog, which was highly regarded. Their importance was recognized, however. Early in the seventh century, a tyrannical governor intent on destroying the city of Ray ordered that all the people’s house Women playing
with a cat on a Hellenistic Greek vase.
cats be killed; the resulting plague of mice forced the inhabi-tants to abandon their homes, and the city was saved only when the queen brought a kitten to entertain the king and thus per-suaded him to remove the wicked governor. Hostility to cats was prevalent in Persia even after the advent of Islam, which favoured them. Medieval Persian poets present them as images of greed, hypocrisy and treachery.8
Cats were well known in India by 500 ad, when one appears in the Pancatantra: he is a treacherous hypocrite and thus reflects the widespread Indian suspicion of cats. Cats are not generally kept as pets in India;
The fable of ‘The Mouse and the Cat’ from a mid-16th-century manuscript of the
Humayunname.
they are more apt to be seen around garbage dumps than in homes. Their habit of constantly licking themselves, signifying attractive cleanliness to westerners, is repellent to orthodox Hindus, who consider saliva unclean.
Cats probably arrived in China early in the Common Era and were certainly well known there by the Tang Dynasty. A Tang poet tells how the Empress Wu Tse-t’ien tried to demonstrate her suc-cess in enforcing Buddha’s law of nonviolence throughout China by raising a kitten and a bird to eat from the same dish. Unfortunately, when they were exhibited at court, the supposedly reformed cat became nervous and killed her erstwhile comrade. In about 1000, the poet Wang Chih wrote that the scholar Chang Tuan cherished seven valuable cats, who had names like White
Kitten by Li Di
(1110–97), ink and colour on silk album leaf.
Phoenix and Drive-Away-Vexation.9
Chinese artists in the Tang and Song periods created far more realistic and attractive portray-als of cats than did their medieval contemporaries in Europe.
Introduced into Japan probably around the seventh century, from China via Korea, cats were at first the rare and prized pets of court aristocrats. It was appropriate to present a cat to the emper-or, and the court lady who wrote Sarashina Diary recorded the death of her cat along with those of her sister and husband. A comment in Murasaki Shikibu’s The Tale of Genji (early eleventh century) shows how cats were customarily treated in court cir-cles: ‘The most unsociable cat, when it finds itself wrapped up in someone’s coat and put to sleep upon his bed – stroked, fed, and tended with every imaginable care – soon ceases to stand upon its dignity.’ The Crown Prince had a passion for cats and was happy to converse about them for any length of time.10
Cats soon multi-plied, of course, but they continued to be treated with respect. They were highly valued throughout the Far East for killing the A print by Hiroshige shows a bob-tailed cat in a courtesan’s window. A monkey holds the kitten it has seized while another kitten looks on, wanting to attack but afraid to. Yi Yuanqui, Cats and
Monkey, c. 1064,
ink and colour on silk album leaf.
rats that destroyed not only foodstuffs but silkworm cocoons. They were and are cherished in Thailand, where they were kept in monasteries and credited with preserving the sacred texts from being gnawed by rodents. From early times up to the present, Buddhist abbots have bred special strains of cats and refused to sell the kittens, but would only give them to people they approved. To this day, children in Thai schools regularly sing a song praising cats for their amiability and helpfulness:
O cat, kitty cat of such lively form
Call kitty, kitty and it comes cutely rubbing your legs Knows how to bring love in the evenings catching
mice
Should be considered grateful should follow its example11
Thus children are systematically taught to be kind to cats, and cats are held up as a model of making oneself useful.
Cats were brought to the Americas by the first European settlers in the seventeenth century. Even now cats in New England, descended mostly from English stock, are genetically distinguishable from those in New York, descended mostly from Dutch stock.
By the Middle Ages, Europeans had settled on the cat as their rodent catcher; but it was no more than that. Cats are constantly portrayed in medieval manuscripts and carvings. Most often, they are playing with or clutching mice, although sometimes they nurse or carry kittens. A cat holds a mouse in her mouth on a misericord in Winchester Cathedral; a gray tabby sits up batting a mouse between her paws on a margin of the Luttrell Psalter (c. 1330). The drawing is anatomically awkward, but the cat’s pose has been precisely observed. Typically, these representations
A cat and rats border a page in a 13th-century French Bible.
27 simply show cats as a familiar part of everyday life; but occa-sionally there are suggestions of their traditional association with witches. An old woman spins under the eyes of two grotesque cats on a stall in the Minster church on the Isle of Thanet, and one rides a cat on a misericord in Winchester Cathedral.
According to King Hywel Dda’s codification of Welsh law early in the tenth century, a cat mature enough to catch mice was valued at four pence, the same as a peasant’s cur. The cat was worth less if it was immature, had defective sight or hearing, or was addicted to going out caterwauling.12
The expression ‘to let the cat out of the bag’ (traceable to the sixteenth century) shows how limited was a cat’s value even in utilitarian terms. A gullible person who was foolish enough to buy ‘a pig in a poke’ (bag) – that is, sight unseen – might find when he opened it that he had nothing but a cat.
In this plate from an emblem book of 1635, the cat is rightly caged because it repre-sents a wicked magistrate; the accompanying moral likens a cat who eats more cheese than the mice to a corrupt magistrate who steals more from society than the thieves he sends to prison.
Because the cat was defined as a rodent killer, and because it hunts on its own, it was and still is seen as more predatory than the dog. Hounds and terriers were bred for killing prey and are still enthusiastic about chasing small animals, but they are rarely presented as ruthless and bloodthirsty. The fact that the cat hunts for itself rather than for human gratification supports the prevailing idea that it selfishly pursues its own interests, in contrast to the dog, who serves and supports man. In Buddhist folklore, a rat was sent for medicine to cure the Buddha when he was mortally ill, but it could not fulfil its mission because a cat seized and ate it on its way. In another version, the cat was the
Cat with mouse, in a late 15th-century illustration of a fable.
A single line con-veys the ferocity of a feline hunter in this illustration, ‘A Cat and a Cock’, by Alexander Calder for a 1931 edition of the Fables of Aesop. The proverbial hostility of cats and dogs, as depicted in a late 15th-century French manuscript of Proverbes en Rimes.
only animal not overwhelmed with awe when the Buddha was passing into Nirvana: it was too intent on eyeing the rat.13
Because the cat sneaks up on its prey rather than forthrightly rushing it down like a dog, humans have called it sly and under-handed, even hypocritical. Only five Aesopian fables feature cats, and two of them turn on their predatory guile. In number 94, having killed most of the mice in a house, the cat tries to lure out the rest by shamming death, and in number 95, he tries to catch the sick hens on a farm by disguising himself as a doctor. In a famous fable in the Indian compilation Pancatantra, a par-tridge and a hare go to consult a neighbouring cat, who lives as a hermit and maintains the highest reputation for holiness and compassion. As they approach, the cat recites edifying sayings about the all-importance of righteousness and the evil of injuring any creature, especially a harmless one. Their trust in him confirmed, the small animals beg him to settle a dispute between them, but the cat tells them he is old and deaf and they must come closer so he can be sure he understands them fully and Two small
petitioners approach a cat whose sanctified appearance con-ceals his predatory intentions. The scene is an illustration by Grandville to La Fontaine’s version (1838) of the ancient Hindu fable of the ‘Devout Cat’.
thus can arrive at the right judgement. So they come right up to him, when of course the cat promptly pounces and kills them.14
This story is told all over India and is immortalized in a famous bas relief at Mahabalipuram in southern India, where the cat stands up on his hind legs with arms extended toward heaven, in a parody of the posture of a pious ascetic.
The sweet, peaceful demeanour of a cat in repose, together with its keenly predatory nature, have made it an emblem of hypocrisy in the West as well. In a widespread folk tale record-ed by the Brothers Grimm, ‘The Cat and Mouse in Partnership’, a cat professes love and friendship so persuasively to a mouse that she agrees to set up housekeeping together. At the cat’s sug-gestion, they buy a large pot of fat to sustain them when winter comes and store it in the church. One day the cat longs for some fat, so she tells the mouse she must go away on family business; she goes straight to the church, eats off the top of the fat, and strolls around town for the rest of the day. She repeats this manoeuvre twice, finishing the fat on her third excursion. When winter sets in and there is no food to be found, the mouse
Illustration by H. J. Ford to the fairy story ‘The Cat and the Mouse in Partnership’ (1894).
suggests that they go and enjoy their fat. Of course, she finds the pot empty; and when she realizes what has happened and scolds the cat, the cat quiets her by eating her up.15
Cats incur further charges of moral turpitude because, instead of immediately killing their prey and wolfing it down, they may prefer to defer eating and play with their catch. Edmund Burke made brilliant use of the contrast between apparent feline blandness and actual feline ruthlessness in his Letter to a Noble
Lord (1795): ideologues who think nothing of sacrificing
humani-ty in pursuit of their utopian experiments resemble ‘the grave, demure, insidious, spring-nailed, velvet-pawed, green-eyed philosophers’ who play dispassionately with the mice they have caught.16
Accordingly, catty means slyly spiteful and feline con-notes stealth. To play cat and mouse with is to toy with a victim in one’s power, and the children’s game ‘Puss in the Corner’ involves surrounding and teasing one of the players by offering and withdrawing opportunities to escape.
On the other hand, the cat’s guile may be justified as the nec-essary resource of a small predator. The beast epic Reynard the
Fox (written down in 1250) portrays a ruthless world in which
the large predators represent the ruling class and the small ones the peasants. Sympathy is directed not to the prey animals, but toward the relatively weak predators who must survive by their wits. Tybert the Cat is second in cunning only to Reynard the Fox himself. Cats and foxes are similarly associated in Japanese folklore, although the cat is generally presented more sympa-thetically than the fox.
Only in the nineteenth century, when love and appreciation of cats first became widespread, did people begin to admire feline guile and hunting ability without qualification. Charles Henry Ross compiled The Book of Cats: Feline Facts and Fancies,
which he celebrated cats such as a clever tom in Callander who stole a bit of beef to lure a rat out of his hole. St George Mivart, a Darwinian zoologist, used the unlikely venue of a dissection manual to exalt the cat as a superb example of the survival of the fittest. He became so enthusiastic about the functional design of the cat family that he promoted them to the position of the high-est mammals after man: the Carnivora are the highhigh-est order of mammals because they are at the top of the food chain, and the Felidae, house cats included, are the best adapted carnivores.
James White’s story ‘The Conspirators’ (1954) reflects not only the modern affection for cats but the twentieth-century readiness to accept their natural predacity. The hero, Felix, fulfils
Tybert the cat castrates a village priest in a 15th-century woodcut illustrating The History of Reynard the Fox. 33
the traditional role of ship’s cat, although he travels on a space ship. It has passed through an atmosphere that heightens intel-ligence, acting first on the smaller animals. Felix’s mental and moral intelligence has been greatly enhanced, although he is sur-passed by the laboratory mice on board, and the humans have not yet improved. The enlightened mice have discovered what happens to laboratory animals and conspire to get off the ship, and they must depend on the cat to help them because only he can move about freely without causing suspicion. His mind has enlarged to the point that he no longer sees the mice simply as prey, although he cannot yet consistently see them as intelligent comrades, and the mice retain suspicions of him. Felix, with his intellectual challenges and moral conflict, has come a very long way from the single-minded hunters of Aesop’s Fables.17
Regardless of the human assumption that they were nothing more than useful little hunters, cats succeeded in moving into people’s homes. Numerous proverbs and folk tales represent the dog as being left outside, while the cat enjoys a warm spot in Pub sign for the
Cat & Fiddle in Bodmin, Cornwall.
the kitchen. Geoffrey Chaucer’s self-indulgent friar in ‘The Summoner’s Tale’ (c. 1390) has to dislodge the cat before appro-priating the most comfortable seat in the house. Unlike the classical compilers, Bartholomew Anglicus, author of the widely read encyclopedia De Proprietatibus rerum, had obviously observed cats around the house. In youth a cat ‘is swift, pliant, and merry’, leaps and rushes at everything that moves, and plays with straws; in age he ‘is a right heavy beast . . . and full sleepy, and lieth slyly in wait for mice’. Like most medieval writers on the natural world, however, Bartholomew could not resist adding a fanciful detail that lent itself to moral edification: a cat that normally parades around the neighbourhood proud of its
A cat is shown comfortably indoors by Cristoforo Rustici (1560–1640) in ‘The Month of January’. 35
appearance can be kept at home by singeing its fur. While cats are indeed obsessively preoccupied with the condition of their coat, the reference to pride suggests a human application, analogous to Aristotle’s imputation of lechery to female cats. Preaching fri-ars made the most of these associations by constantly applying them to vain women. Nicholas Bozon sadistically elaborated: just as a cat can be made to stay at home by shortening her tail, cut-ting her ears and singeing her fur, women can be kept there by shortening the trains of their dresses, disarranging their head-dresses and staining their clothes.18
Since cats were kept solely for their utility in keeping down the rodent population, no one noticed their beauty, charm, or capaci-ty for companionship. They rarely appear in literature, and then only to furnish stock comparisons such as likening a cruel mis-tress to a cat playing with a mouse. Even William Shakespeare’s imagination was not inspired by the cat. Like his mundane Shylock, he saw it as no more than a ‘harmless necessary’ animal. His Benedick jokes about the practice of hanging up a cat in a leather bag to shoot at it; his Lysander calls Hermia a cat for show-ing the cat’s claws and aggressive sexuality; his Tarquin hears Lucrece’s prayers like a cat dallying with the mouse panting under his paw; his Lady Macbeth goads her husband with the proverb about the cat who wants to eat fish but not to wet its feet.19
Visual artists recognized the decorative value of cats long before writers noticed their charm. Renaissance painters included cats when they placed religious events in contempo-rary settings, especially when the Biblical scenes involved eat-ing. Tintoretto included a cat in three of his six versions of the Last Supper, in his Christ at Emmaus and in Belshazzar’s Feast. In one Last Supper (1592–4), a bold, sturdy cat occupies the exact centre of the foreground, in front of the table where Christ sits with the Apostles. It stands on its hind legs to investigate what ‘A cat playing with
a mouse’, from a Latin Psalter made in England
c. 1325–35.
Las bellas artes reconocieron al gato
como tema del arte, porque a la
literatura se lo impedía la semántica.
Oculto el gato, tras lo que el gato era
como símbolo, los escritores no
supieron ver su agilidad, su garbo, su
espléndida ataraxia. La semántica
impedía ver al gato como un
maravilloso objeto natural.
is inside the basket from which a maid is taking food, while a barely visible dog watches wistfully from under the table. In a
Supper at Emmaus by Philippe de Champaigne (1602–74), a cat
in the centre foreground is actively engaged in snagging left-overs from a plate, while a servant pushes it away. This lifelike practical conflict contrasts strikingly with the stiffly painted figures absorbed in edifying conversation above the table. The cat could not be less interested in the resurrected Jesus, but it is too attractively painted, with its soft silver tabby fur and its sweet expression, to evoke moral condemnation.
These animals were probably included to make a spiritual event more accessible by domesticating it. Sometimes, however, the cat’s conspicuous lack of interest in human activities does
Illustration of the proverb that cats long to eat fish but do not want to wet their feet, from a late 15th-century French manuscript of Proverbes en Rimes. 37
take on moral implications. A cat that pointedly dissociates itself from a sacred scene – like the sullen cat with ears laid back that crouches on a stool at the edge of Jacopo Bassano’s Last Supper (1546–8) – may seem to be alien, even hostile, to holy things. In Domenico Ghirlandaio’s Last Supper (1481), Judas sits alone on one side of the table, his isolation emphasized by a cat sitting on the floor beside him and staring directly at the viewer, while Judas pretends to take part in the social interaction. The cat in the cen-ter of Lorenzo Lotto’s Annunciation (c. 1527) is actively hostile: it rushes, distraught, away from the angel who announces to Mary that she will bear the Son of God and thus make possible the divine plan for the salvation of humanity. Several pictures of the In a painting by
the Master of the Life of St Joseph,
c. 1500, a baleful
cat with human eyes sits by Pharaoh’s butler, who is in the act of making a false promise to Joseph.
Holy Family include cats that prowl or sleep or stalk birds while all the humans in the scene are worshipping Jesus. In Giulio Romano’s Madonna of the Cat, Mary gazes lovingly at baby Jesus, who extends his arms toward an adoring John the Baptist; mean-while, an avidly greedy cat schemes to steal food from a plate on the floor. When the cat is stalking a goldfinch, as it does in Federico Barocci’s Madonna with a Cat (c. 1574), it is symbolically jeopardizing the divine scheme for the salvation of humanity; for birds represent the soul and the goldfinch, because its taste for
While the Virgin, St Anne and John the Baptist adore the infant Jesus, a sinister cat glares belligerently, its golden eyes fixed on a plate of food, in Giulio Romano’s Madonna of the Cat, c. 1523, oil on panel. 39
thistles suggests the crown of thorns, introduces an added refer-ence to Christ’s redeeming passion. Three centuries later, William Holman Hunt took up the same symbolism in his
Awakening of Conscience (1853). A young kept woman has just
resolved to reform and starts out of her lover’s lap. Under the table, a wicked-looking tabby cat looks up with fiery orange eyes, so unpleasantly startled by her moral transformation that it has released the bird it has caught. Like the cats in Renaissance Holy Family pictures, it is trying to catch a bird, symbolic of the soul, but is frustrated by divine grace. C. S. Lewis drew on this tradi-tional symbolism in The Last Battle (the last chronicle of Narnia, 1956), where the cold irreverent tomcat Ginger leads in the scheme to overthrow the divine order, incarnated in the noble lion Aslan.
In secular works, cats are also typically associated with food, which they are usually stealing. Guiseppe Recco’s Cat Stealing
Fish looks up with a defiant snarl when it is disturbed raiding a
pile of fish. Behind a luxuriously set table in Alexandre-François Desportes’ Still-life with a Cat (c. 1661–73), we see the head and paw of a cat that has just hooked an oyster. With its big eyes focused on its catch, its ears pricked forward and its mouth set in naughty resolution, the cat is vividly intent on carrying off its prey before any human might interfere. In a companion piece,
Still-life with a Dog, a spaniel sniffs wistfully at a ham on a table.
Frans Snyders portrayed a mother cat plundering a heap of dead game with her family: she pulls at a peacock, one kitten has seized a little bird and two others are about to jump for one apiece. They are unreconstructed wild hunters, in contrast to the dog that sleeps peacefully in the foreground. Cats often add to the atmosphere of animal indulgence and impropriety in Dutch genre scenes of revelry in taverns. But in The King Drinks (c. 1640–45), Jacob Jordaens made the cat’s aloofness a positive
quality. The sour, baleful tomcat crouching in the foreground pointedly isolates himself from a coarse and jolly Epiphany revel full of drinking and vomiting, while a dog watches eagerly, apparently longing for a drink.
At best cats were considered harmless and necessary; at worst, they were common animals of negligible monetary value and were therefore handy victims for casual sadism. They were easily obtainable at no cost and are satisfyingly demonstrative when subjected to pain. They were stuffed into an effigy of the Pope at Queen Elizabeth’s coronation procession, providing vivid sound effects when it was burned. They were slowly burned on St John’s Eve at the Place de Grève in Paris, after which the people
41
Alexandre-François Desportes, Still-life
with a Cat, late 17th
century, oil on canvas.
collected their ashes as good luck charms. This celebration lasted until 1648, when Louis xiv presided. When the victorious Puritan rebels in England wanted to demonstrate their contempt for Anglican churches, they hunted a cat with hounds through Lichfield Cathedral every day (1643) and roasted a cat on a spit in Illustration by
Wenceslaus Hollar of a fable in which a depu-tation of mice try to propitiate the cat; after pretend-ing to agree to a peace treaty, he routs and kills them.
Ely Cathedral (1638). The official recorders of these events were shocked by the vandalism and profanation, not the cruelty.20
Cruelty to animals was generally accepted in the Early Modern period because it was not condemned by any Christian church. Thomas Aquinas argued in his Summa Theologica that we have no obligation to extend charity to ‘irrational animals’ that lack free will, cannot participate in a society ‘regulated by reason’ and can-not attain everlasting life. Moreover, by giving man dominion over the other animals, God gave us permission to treat them any way we like. René Descartes reinforced this position in the seven-teenth century by locating consciousness and feelings, as well as free will, in the rational soul: since only humans have a soul, ani-mals cannot feel pain or emotion any more than a machine can; logically, then, what would be manifestations of pain in humans are merely meaningless, automatic movements in other animals.21
Muhammad had a more enlightened attitude: he taught that Allah requires kindness not only to people but to all his crea-tures. Although he forbade all cruelty to animals, such as branding a donkey on a sensitive spot or organizing animal fights, he had a particular fondness for cats. There is a widely accepted tradition that one day Muhammad’s cat was sleeping on his cloak when he was called to prayers; he took off his cloak rather than disturb the animal. He was so shocked by a woman who had kept her cat locked up until it slowly died, refusing either to feed it or allow it to go out and forage for itself, that he repeatedly told how he had seen her in a vision of Hell, being lacerated by a cat. While dogs were considered unclean in the Arab world, a cat could eat from a human’s dish of food or drink the water for ablutions without polluting them. The cat ‘is not unclean’, Muhammad said; ‘it is one of those . . . who go round among you’. That is, cats had the run of the house, while dogs (only used for working or hunting) were kept outside. A close
companion of Muhammad was called ‘Abu Huraira’, Father of Cats, because of his particular attachment to them. One day, it is said, the Prophet was threatened by a snake and Abu Huraira’s cat killed the snake just in time. In return, Muhammad stroked her back, ensuring that cats never fall on their backs, and ran his fingers over her head, leaving the four stripes still to be found on the forehead of a tabby cat.
In the Moslem world, it was cats, rather than dogs, that were pampered, kissed and allowed to sleep in their owners’ beds. The ninth-century poet Ibn al-Mu’tazz wrote an epitaph on his cat, who was ‘like a son’ to him, but unfortunately strayed into a neighbour’s pigeon-house and was executed. A thirteenth-century sultan endowed a ‘cats’ garden’ to provide for the cats of Cairo, and people bring food there to this day.22
In the West, moral concern for animals became general only in the eighteenth century, when the religious law that excluded beasts from moral consideration gave way to a sentimental morality that emphasized good feeling over moral law and focused on the lower animals’ capacity for feeling rather than their lack of human reason. A systematic opposition to cruelty toward animals began to take shape, powered by a new empha-sis on kindness toward the helpless and dependent. Alexander Pope taught in the Essay on Man (1733–4) that we share the cre-ation with animals, and since the barrier between us and them is so very thin, we are not entitled to abuse or exploit them. When he condemned cruelty to animals, he singled out cats because they were particularly victimized: they ‘have the misfortune, for no manner of reason, to be treated as common enemies wher-ever found. The conceit that a cat has nine lives has cost at least nine lives in ten of the whole race of them: scarce a boy in the streets but has in this point outdone Hercules himself, who was famous for killing a monster that had but three lives.’23
Although keeping cats as pets was becoming normal in the eighteenth century, most people still saw them as no more than humble domestic animals, kept for use and deserving humane treatment only because they were sentient. Edward Moore’s fable ‘The Farmer, the Spaniel, and the Cat’ represents a farmer sharing his dinner with his spaniel as a matter of course. When his cat ‘humbly craved a servant’s share’ and the dog objected to her getting any, she meekly conceded his superior merit, but pointed out that she contributed ‘to the good of man’ insofar as her nature allowed; that is, by killing rats and mice. On the basis of this plea, the farmer threw her a morsel.24
Because the cat was identified with the essential but humdrum function of rodent-catching it was not thought of as a luxury ani-mal. The thirteenth-century Ancrene Riwle, an austere guidebook for young women dedicated to the religious life, allowed them to keep no animal except a cat. After William Hogarth’s Moll
In one of a series of engravings by William Hogarth,
The Harlot’s Progress (1732),
the cat indicates both Moll’s pro-fession and her decline in finan-cial status.
Playful kittens in a typically sentimental 19th-century oil painting by Louis-Eugène Lambert,
Hackabout is thrown out by her rich keeper and declines into a common prostitute, she shares her squalid room with a cat (Plate 3of The Harlot’s Progress, 1732). A worried looking cat nurses her kittens in the wretched garret occupied by the family of Hogarth’s
Distressed Poet (1737). In China, the arrival of a strange cat in a
house was supposed to portend poverty, because the cat foresaw that the house would soon fall into dilapidation and therefore be overrun with mice.
Cats were widely appreciated as pets in the nineteenth cen-tury, but they did not contribute to their owner’s prestige like dogs or horses. In 1881 Mivart called the cat ‘the inmate of a
47 Even in the cat-loving 19th century, there were alternative views. Although Edwin Landseer fondly sentimen-talized most animals, his paint-ing The Cat’s Paw (c. 1824), in which a monkey forces a cat to pull his chestnuts out of the fire, is posi-tively sadistic.
multitude of humble homes where the dog has no place’. Thorstein Veblen, who scorned dogs as striking examples of conspicuous consumption, approvingly pointed out that the cat is useless as a status symbol: she can be acquired for little or nothing, can be supported cheaply and might even ‘serve a use-ful purpose’; nor does she look up to her owner. More conven-tional people dismissed cats as worthless because their owners were so often poor people. Noblemen’s gamekeepers had no scruples about killing cats as threats to game and displaying their stuffed bodies, along with those of hawks, owls and weasels. Even the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals initially neglected to include a cat among the domestic animals pictured on its Queen’s Medal for Kindness. Queen Victoria insisted that one be placed in the foreground, explain-ing that the royal family should do somethexplain-ing to change public aversion to and contempt for cats, ‘which were generally mis-understood and grossly ill-treated’.25
Even when cats were typically perceived as common and insignificant though useful, there has always been something about them that distinguishes them from ordinary domesticat-ed animals. They move silently, unprdomesticat-edictably and with perfect precision – so inconspicuously as to suggest that they can magi-cally appear and disappear. They see in near darkness and hear sounds inaudible to humans, even when they appear to be nap-ping. They can anticipate earthquakes and severe electrical storms (presumably through natural sensitivity to minute vibra-tions or to an increase in static electricity). Indeed, their senses are so superior to our own that we imagine that they have pre-ternatural knowledge, even the ability to predict the future. (We do not marvel at the dog’s equally remarkable senses, because we see it as our subordinate ally; instead, we take them for grant-ed as a practical means to augment our own.) Cats have a habit of looking at us steadily without showing any sign of emotional engagement. The cat’s dispassionate, wide-eyed gaze, unusually direct for an animal, arouses suspicions that it is challenging us or relentlessly searching into our inner selves. These natural qualities can readily be interpreted as evidence of uncanny abil-ities, which may be perceived as divine or demonic.
Although cats live closer to humans than any other animals except dogs, they do not share the dog’s exuberant emotional
2
The Magic of Cats,
Evil and Good
49
El perro es una
proyección de los
sentidos humanos,
el gato, en cambio,
tiene un rango de
sentidos que va
mucho más allá de
lo humano pero los
usa para sí mismo,
por eso, siempre
es algo
expressiveness or its eagerness to please, to be loved, to engage in fellowship with people. Self-contained, independent, quietly pursuing their own agenda, they seem to live in a world of their own, inaccessible to humans. In the words that Angela Carter playfully puts into the mouth of Puss in Boots, in her interpre-tation of the tale, cats always wear ‘small, cool, quiet Mona Lisa smiles . . . So all cats have a politician’s air; we smile and smile and so they think we’re villains.’1
Humans can easily imagine the cat listening in on the family conversation for some sinister purpose of its own, as it does in the Irish folktale ‘Owney and Owney-Na-Peak’.
We think of cats as lower animals, and yet they live in our households without acknowledging any inferiority. In the medieval and early modern periods, when a hierarchical order in The forthright
gaze of the cat: a 19th-century Russian folk print or loubok, ‘The Cat Alabrys’.
society and nature was assumed to be right and necessary, their disregard for human wishes and expectations was unpleasantly disconcerting. Moreover, because the natural dominion of man was ordained by providence, their refusal to recognize it demon-strated antagonism to God as well as man. Therefore, it seemed likely that their secret nocturnal world was presided over by the Prince of Darkness.
From the Middle Ages through the early modern period, the cat’s seemingly supernatural abilities, together with its cool detachment from human concerns, laid it open to suspicion. This provided any rationalization that might be needed for rit-uals such as slowly burning cats to death on St John’s Eve, 23 June, in order to expel evil from the Christian community and protect the growing crops by driving away evil spirits. Because of their supposed congeniality with Satan, cats were used to extract concessions from him. A coven of witches in North Berwick, who confessed to raising a storm in order to wreck the ship on which King James vi was bringing his queen from Denmark in 1590, explained that they achieved their purpose by christening a cat, binding pieces of a dead man to each part of it, and throwing it into the sea. In the hideous Taigheirm rit-ual of Scotland, a person striving to obtain the second sight would slowly roast cats as a sacrifice to the infernal powers. If the human perpetrator and his succession of victims could hold out for four solid days, the spirits from hell would appear in the form of black cats and grant his wish. Similar beliefs persisted among uneducated people as late as the nineteenth century, as the heroine of Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South (1855) is appalled to discover. When she returns to her father’s rural parish, an old peasant woman complains that Betty Barnes has stolen her cat and roasted it alive as a magical spell to avert her husband’s anger, on the assumption that the cries of a cat in
agony would compel the powers of darkness to fulfill her wishes. The woman does not doubt the efficacy of the spell, nor would she have been distressed by the cruelty had the victim not been her own cat.2
A cat might be a demon himself. A fisherman in Connemara always brought in plenty of fish, but every night a great black cat would come in and eat the best ones before they could be got to market. One night he came in when the fisherman’s wife was there, looked over the fish that was laid out on the tables, and warned her not to disturb him or make a fuss. Then he jumped up and started to devour the fish, growling at the woman when she approached. She tried to drive him off with a blow that should have broken his back, but he only grinned at her and went on tearing at the fish. But when she got a bottle of holy water and threw some on him, his body burned to a cinder and disappeared.3
Cats were more often accused of allying themselves with human agents of Satan, providing alternative forms for witches and assisting them as familiars. However, although animals were prominent in witchcraft superstitions because of their importance in pagan worship, the animals involved were not necessarily cats. Women accused of witchcraft in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were supposed to turn themselves into hares as often as cats, and their familiars might be mongrel dogs, mice or even toads. It was only in later centuries, when witchcraft became a picturesque theme for fantasy and cats were perceived as attractively exotic and mysterious, that they became the featured animal.
Nevertheless, cats did frequently appear in the witch trials. Their love of physical intimacy with those they like and their ability to appear and disappear without warning would have particularly suited them to be familiars. Fond owners would
A 20th-century postcard reduces the Salem witch-craft panic to a joke. In a 1909 cover for Harper’s
Weekly, witch and
familiar have been trivialized into a pretty girl and a cute kitten.
naturally cuddle, pamper or talk to their cats; and this behav-iour automatically laid them open to a charge of witchcraft. Elizabeth Francis, a farmer’s wife condemned in Essex in 1566, had learned witchcraft from her grandmother, who had given her a white spotted cat, imprudently named Sathan, and instructed her to give him her blood, feed him on bread and milk, and keep him in a basket. He spoke to her ‘in a strange hollow voice’, which she learned to understand. She asked the cat to make her rich and get her a husband, rewarding him with drops of her blood, which she produced by pricking herself in various places that left lasting red spots. On the cat’s advice, she tried to get Andrew Byles to marry her by letting him seduce her; when he refused, she got Sathan to destroy his goods and then kill him. Afterwards, Sathan did get her a husband; but she became unhappy with him and got the cat to kill their child and inflict lameness on the man. Finally she gave Sathan to Mother Agnes Waterhouse in exchange for a cake, and he obliged his new owner by killing a cow and three geese belonging to her neighbours.4
Jean Bodin, a noted witch-hunter, relates that in 1561 at Vernon in France, witches and wizards used to assemble at night in an old castle in the shape of cats. Some bold investiga-tors went to watch them; one was killed and the others badly clawed. However, they managed to wound several of the cats, and the next day some of the suspected humans appeared with similar wounds. Elizabeth Morse, accused as a witch in Massachusetts in 1679–80, attacked a neighbour in the form of a strange ‘white thing like a cat’; he managed to smash it against a fence, and that very night, he learned, Goodwife Morse had been treated by a doctor for a wounded head. The same ‘great white cat’ assaulted another witness by climbing on his chest, seizing his neckcloth and coat, and coming ‘between [his] legs,
so that [he] could not well go forward’ – normal feline behaviour, of course, though made sinister by human preconceptions.5
In the folktale ‘The Haunted Mill’, a miller could not keep an apprentice because of the horrible nightly disturbances in his mill; finally a young man volunteered to spend the night there with his axe and his prayer book. On the stroke of twelve, an old and a young gray cat came in and sat down, meowing to each other and clearly annoyed to find a wide-awake armed man. They snatched at the axe and book, but he was too quick for them. At 1 a.m. the younger cat batted at the candle to put it out, but the young man managed to prevent her by striking off her right paw with the axe. The next day, he saw that what he had was not a paw, but a hand. The miller’s wife did not want to appear; when she did, they saw why – her right hand was missing.6
Shape-shifting between women and cats (as well as foxes) is also a common theme in Japanese folklore. The evil creatures in the Japanese stories are not women taking the form of cats, but demon cats taking the form of women, typically seductive ones. They were human size, with huge glaring eyes and teeth that they fixed in their victim’s neck. In a culture where cats were preferably bob-tailed, they often had a long double tail. ‘The Vampire Cat of Nabeshima’ tells how one night a huge cat entered the bedroom of O Toyo, favourite lady of the prince of Hizen, throttled her, buried her corpse, and assumed her form. (Felines kill large prey animals by choking off their breath with a bite to the throat.) The prince, who knew nothing of this, con-tinued to love the false O Toyo. Night by night his strength failed until he became dangerously ill, and physicians could not help him. Since he suffered most during the night and was trou-bled by horrible dreams, a hundred of his retainers were set to keep watch while he slept; but just before ten o’clock, they were all overcome with sleep. Then the false O Toyo glided in to suck
his neck until sunrise. Finally a young soldier, convinced the prince was bewitched, came to watch by him. He managed to avoid falling asleep by twisting his dagger in his thigh, and so he saw a beautiful woman approaching the prince. By staring fixedly at her, he prevented her from exerting her witchcraft, and she had to retire. The same thing happened the next night. Now sure of the truth, the soldier went to the false O Toyo’s room to kill her. She turned back into a cat, sprang onto the roof, and escaped to harass the local people. Ultimately, the prince organized a hunt and killed her.7
These demon-cat stories took particular hold on people’s imaginations because many of them, such as ‘The Cat-Witch of Okabe’, were enacted on the stage. This witch was a cat who appeared in the form of an old woman and haunted and terrified the young virgins who served at the local sanctuary. In Utagawa Kuniyoshi’s portrayal of a kabuki performance of about 1835, a malevolent woman with large cat’s ears and furry clawed paws kneels in the centre, with a huge, glaring cat Illustration to
a well-known Japanese folk tale,
The Vampire Cat of Nabeshima,
19th-century woodblock print. The huge demon-cat throttling a lady has the characteristic double tail.
crouched behind her and a samurai on each side attempting to strike her down. By each of the samurai is a cat dancing on its hind legs with a cloth bound around its head, alluding to the folk belief that if a napkin is missing, the cat must have stolen it to put on its head and join in a dance of the cats, who howl at the top of their voices, ‘Neko ja! We are cats!’ Typically they do this in the main hall of a temple or some other place that should be kept quiet.8
This maniacal dance was witnessed by a samurai when he took shelter for the night in a lonely mountain temple, only what the cats were yelling was ‘Tell it not to Shippeitaro’. The next day he found out at the nearest village that every year these cats forced the peasants to shut their fairest maiden into a cage and take her to the temple to be devoured by the spirit of the mountain. Wanting to help, the samurai asked them who or what was Shippeitaro. They told him it was a brave and fine dog belonging to their head man; the samurai borrowed the dog, put him in the cage prepared for the girl, and had it carried to
Utagawa Kuniyoshi,
The Cat-Witch of Okabe, c. 1835,
woodblock print. Two samurai are attempting to strike down the malevo-lent old witch, who has a cat’s ears and paws; a giant cat looms behind her, and two ordinary ones dance in fiendish glee.
the temple. At midnight the phantom cats reappeared, along with a monstrously huge and ferocious tomcat, who sprang to the cage with screams of delight and, after sufficiently taunting his supposed victim, opened the door. But it was Shippeitaro who rushed out and seized hold of the tomcat, so that the samu-rai could dispatch him with his sword. Then the dog killed all the other cats, and the village was freed from their oppression.9
The thought of large gatherings of cats aroused unease in Europe as well. People said that the neighbourhood cats held secret meetings that humans had better not intrude on. Sometimes the mischief could be prevented by cutting off the ends of their tails, in the same way that Japanese docked the A cat leads a
tem-perance rally in M. Brière’s draw-ing, Assembly of
tails of long-tailed kittens in order to deprive them of the sinis-ter powers conferred by these organs. A Breton story tells how the local cats would assemble by moonlight on certain days near the Fairy Rocks and the Standing Stones. Sensible people stayed well away from this place, but Jean Foucault, returning home drunk and happily singing, stumbled into the assembly. His voice stuck in his throat as he saw the cats arch their backs, swell their tails, and stare at him with glowing eyes. When the biggest of all rushed at him, he shut his eyes and recited his act of contrition, for he expected to be torn in pieces. But instead of claws, he felt the soft, warm fur of a cat’s back rubbing along his legs and heard joyful purring; it turned out to be his own cat, who escorted him through the assembly, telling the others to let him pass. The story is based on the traditional suspicion that cats have supernatural powers that they are likely to use against humans, but here it has been modified by the modern recogni-tion that they can be friendly companions.
In an Irish tale, ‘Owney and Owney-Na-Peak’, the hero makes his fortune when he wanders past the graveyard one night and happens on a great meeting of the local cats, including his own. He overhears from them the secret of how to cure the king’s blindness. As he is repeating it to his cousin, he notices that his cat is listening, so he takes care to wait until she leaves the room and to close the door after her. Even in the nineteenth century, Gascon peasants affirmed that cats were regularly paid by the devil to keep watch, although they could not say what the cats’ wages might be or what they did with them: ‘Fools take no pre-cautions about cats, but discreet people mistrust them. Many of these beasts have formed a contract with the devil, who pays them to keep watch all night, and be sentinels, when the evil spirits assemble.’ Cats sleep all day, or pretend to do so, because ‘they are tired from patrolling all night . . . with such good
tinels, evil spirits always get warning to disappear in time.’ It is particularly imprudent to become familiar with one’s cat, for cats have a natural inclination to assume equality with humans and will exact vengeance if they do not get privileges they have been led to expect. A woman in a French story loved her cat so much that she let him eat at the table with her. When she excluded him one day because she had company, he throttled her during the night. Another cat took the same revenge when his mistress punished him for dressing up in human clothes while she was at church.10
Even scientific writers might endow cats with malignant pow-ers that bordered on the supernatural. These authors did have two actual conditions to build on. One was ailurophobia, an irra-tional fear of cats, triggered by their sudden unpredictable movements and their habit of sitting and staring with two big eyes. This is far from the most common animal phobia, but it has attracted disproportionate attention; and it is true that cats can cause panic attacks, even fainting, in some people. The other condition is the much more common allergy to cats (or, more specifically, to the dander resulting from cat saliva when they lick their fur), which affects 5 to 10 per cent of the population of the United States. This can produce not only watering of the nose and eyes, but asthma leading to a terrifying stoppage of breath. Ambroise Paré, a distinguished physician, heightened these small effects to make the cat into a truly dangerous animal. He wrote in his treatise Of Poisons (c. 1575) that its stare can cause a susceptible person to fall unconscious, and proceeded to a long list of imaginary examples of ‘malicious virulency’ in the cat. He claimed that its brain, hair and breath are poisonous to humans and that sleeping with one causes tuberculosis.11
Edward Topsell elaborated on Paré’s list in his History of
be a natural history. People who sleep with cats fall into con-sumption because a cat’s breath destroys the lungs. Its flesh is poisonous, its ‘venomous teeth’ inflict a deadly bite, and swal-lowing its hair unawares causes suffocation. Like Paré, he blames cats for the ailurophobes’ reaction to them: cats can ‘poison a man with very looking upon him’, since some men have a natural abhorrence of cats that causes them to ‘fall into passions, fret-tings, sweating, pulling off their hats, and trembling fearfully’. Cats’ expressive vocalizations suggest that they have the power of speech, and even that they ‘have a peculiar intelligible language among themselves’. The cat uses her rough tongue to lick human flesh so vigorously that she draws blood, and when human blood mixes with her spittle, she runs mad. At night her eyes ‘can hardly
A cat from Edward Topsell’s History of Four-Footed Beasts (1607). 61
